My brain has been very foggy recently and I have not been thinking clearly enough to post here. Here, however is an interesting link to an article and short video describing how the human brain is wired for kindness, compassion, empathy. Forgive the cheesy cartoon image.
Category Archives: Thoughts
Suffering’s Structure
James Chastek has some, as ever, pithy things to say about The Structure of Suffering. Here are a couple of extracts. 1.) Numinous insight. The one who suffers is seen as speaking with authority, even prophetically. It’s not mere politeness that keeps us from contradicting or arguing with him, but a sense that he’s in …
“Jesuit Day” Chez Renaissance Mathematicus
Thony Christie, The Renaissance Mathematicus, posts about the role of Jesuit scientists in the early modern period. Since this blog started I have attempted to draw my readers attention to those contributions by profiling individual Jesuits and their contributions and also on occasions defending them against their largely ignorant critics. I have decided to …
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Faceless
Google Street View tries to protect the privacy of the people it photographs by automatically detecting the presence of the human face and suitably pixellating it. Making an interesting theological statement, Google doesn’t distinguish between the human and the divine: Marion Balac has a page full of faceless gods.
Fatigue Explained?
In yet another fascinating article Cort Johnson explores the work of Japanese scientists into the way fatigue is produced in the brain and the body. Thus, there are two parts to centrally produced fatigue. There is the facilitation process that allows us to activate the motor cortex and recruit more muscles in the face of …
The Autonomic Nervous System and ME
Two recent posts at Health Rising, ‘Biomarker…‘ and ‘System Reset…‘, explore the role of the autonomic nervous system in ME. The research they describe definitely resonates with my own experience. I can get stuck in a state of ANS arousal that nothing seems to shift once it is in place–which is just as described. One …
The Galileo Affair: Rough Guides II
The Renaissance Mathematicus continues his Rough Guides with more on heliocentricity and the Church. As always fascinating. (And full of Jesuits too)
ME: More Research
The brain fog has been coming and going over the last few days but I have been able to cobble together the rest of that article on teaching of spiritual direction for The Way. Unfortunately it feels cobbled together: I hope that the editor will help me put some better shape to it. Meanwhile I …
Brain Fog
Sorry that updates are sparse right now — I am suffering from brain fog, a common symptom of ME. Mine is generally better than this but right now I find it hard to string two sentences together, let alone say what I want to say. This is particularly distressing since I am behind deadline on …
The Galileo Affair: Rough Guides continue
The Renaissance Mathematicus continues his series of Rough Guides on the transition to heliocentricity, this time focusing more directly on the confrontation between Galileo and the Church. I have been criticised for claiming, in a recent post, that given time the Catholic Church would have come to accept heliocentricity in the seventeenth-century and in fact …
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